Inspired by Estimated Prophet - Worst rejection letter from editor stories

Post yours here!

Mine -

Science Fiction Age Magazine, ED Scott Edelman. Year 1997.

Post it note stuck to cover sheet of submission that read, in crooked scrawly handwriting -

"sorry. out of forms"

Hey, but you got a handwritten one! :thumbsup:

. . it down and after I thought I had hacked out enough to get the letter printed, the editor that was in charge of approving the LTE's that they print, told me that my last submission was still too long.

So, I trimmed it down again - this was the 3rd draft. Once again I had carefully counted the number of words I had used in my LTE, to be within their rules.

My newspaper had a 200 word limit and it was hard for me to tell people just why they shouldn't vote for Bush and should vote for Gore within a 200 word limit.

My 3rd draft was rejected for being too long also!

From typing class, I learned that "a word" is considered to be 5 characters long, and spaces between words counted for overall word length.

Needless to say, I was pissed off after my 3rd attempt.
I counted the words again and came up with 187.

So, I sent an e-mail to the editor and told her how I was counting my words to keep within the word limit, and asked her how she calculated that my letters had been too long to print.

She responded the next day with a sophomorish answer right out of high school and claimed that they didn't use that method to calculate space for the letters they printed in their paper.

So, noticing that the editor had a famous Southern family name, I sent a smart-assed e-mail to her suggesting that the reason she had turned down my LTE subsmissions, even though they were ALL within the 200 word limit, was probably because she was related to that famous Confederate family and was just trying to protect Bush, because he was from Texas.

She sent me a response that same day.
She was pretty PO'ed about it and denied that she was related to any Confederate family.

Then, the very next day, in the paper was a LTE printed bashing Gore that was over 300 words long - it was 318 words long, using my method of word counting.

That really torqued me off, so I sent a 3rd e-mail to the editor and I mentioned that LTE and the length to the editor and said -
The bias of this newspaper is evident. Long essays degrading the Vice President of the United States are accepted fare for this right-wing publication, but a short essay explaining why Gore would be a better President than a Governor of Texas is not!


The next day the 3rd version of my LTE was printed.